Note 110 — HOGARTH ILLUSTRATED.
Reading edition
The licentiousness of the present age is a favourite topic with some of our popular writers; yet the drama is considered as the mirror of public manners; and the drama is rather more correct, and less indelicate, than it was in the year 1327, when, in a play of the Olde and Newe Testament, performed at Chester, the actors who played Adam and Eve, trying to represent these two characters to the life, came upon the stage quite naked! What modern manager could have dressed, or rather undressed, his performers with a stricter regard to propriety?